NAVAJO HOUSING
MASTER PLAN
PennDesign - Fall 2014
Critics Tony Atkin & Laurie Olin
in collaboration with W. Diptee, A. Rahim & Y. Zolotorevskaya
This collaborative landscape & architecture
studio developed a master plan for the Navajo
community of Crown Point, NM.
Using a framework of public utilities, my team
of four advanced a comprehensive plan to
tackle disparate problems ranging from flood
mitigation to community building. We strived to
provide the minimum number of services
needed to allow the people of Crown Point to
overcome their inertia.
As the only student concentrating solely on
architecture, my greatest contribution was the
design of the housing units.

UT
UT CO
CO
AZ NM
NM
AZ

Crown Point, part of the Navajo Nation, is a small
and isolated town in north-west New Mexico.
This isolation is not confined to geography, but
entrenched in social & economic difficulties
that fragment the residents.

64

SHIPROCK
SHIPROCK

FARMINGTON
FARMINGTON

BLOOMFIELD
BLOOMFIELD

pop.
42,877
pop.
45,877

491

One branch of their troubles is rooted in a long
history of American colonialism that subjugated
the Navajo and left them neither truely anchored
in tradition* nor fully prepared to engage
contemporary western culture, while the other is
based in enviromental concerns such as water
scarcity & the seasonal devastation brought by
flash flooding.
To deal with such large yet subtle, universal yet
intimate problems, we formulated a tripartite
plan.

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1. Connect Crown Point to tradition, economies,
education & the greater geography through
simple means such as an expanded bus system
& partnerships with outside institutions.
2. Disperse damaging waters by rerouting
main storm surges while retaining meaningful
amounts to establish natural vegetation and
agricultural initiatives.

GALLUP

GALLUP

pop.
21,678
pop.
21,678
40

3. Gather the people of Crown Point together
through community shared assets like our
proposed linear park & flea market.

NATURE TRAILS
The nature trails, Crown Pointâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s first line of defense against seasonal flooding, contain a series of check
dams that slow water velocity, reduce erosion during flash flood events, and increase water infiltration
for the promotion of a lush and vibrant habitat. The nature trails encourage a commitment to the
enviroment that is intrinsic to Navajo culture.

Section Perspective by Yelena Zolotorevskaya

SKATE PARK
The skate park, one of the resilient programs bundeled within the linear park, is positioned in a main
flood path so that it collects and retains water before it can damage Navajo Technical University and
community residences. During most of the year the park doesnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t gather water, but students, tourists, and
locals enabling exchange and providing a framework for free recreational activity.

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9

AGRICULTURE
Food and its cultivation play an important role in Navajo culture, but flooding and water scarcity make it
difficult in Crown Point. Two techniques allow both small-scale plots and land for orchards: the storage of
storm water collected in cisterns in the nearby park and the use of grey water.

RETRO-FIT
Existing Federal Housing was built with no regard to climate or culture. The master plan makes modest
additions, integrating trombe walls for heating and grey water systems. They grey water systems feed to
park planters, providing greater privacy through vegetation, then to garden plots. The cost & value of the
retro-fit acts as a buy-in for residents to take stake in their community.

HOUSING UNIT
In each house the primary axis of circulation, oriented for peak solar radiaion gain, doubles as a trombe
wall. The rest of the house plays off this axis and relationship to the sun with varying levels of transparency
from the black brick with its narrow windows, to kalwall, a tansluecent insulating material, to the northern
facing curtain walls.

Iron Lung is a building that seeks to be carbon
negative & scrub CO 2 from Tribeca, NY
while acting as a beacon for the progressive
change required to combat Global Warming.
Located by the Canal Street Holland Tunnel
exit, where over one-hundred thousand cars
pass each day, Iron Lung utilizes fluid
dynamics to filter the surrounding air.
Employing the stack effect, the building
enables
cross-flow
filtration,
pulling
particulate matter & other pollutants from the
air into plant beds resulting in increased
vegetation growth and the return of the native
wilderness to Manhattan.

Combustion engines found in automobiles exhaust
different pollutants, of which NO2, CO2, &
SO2 are green house gases that contribute to
global warming.
Elemental carbons like Carbon Monoxide are
produced by the incomplete burning of fuel.
Nitrogen Oxides are produced by high heat
during the burning of fuel, while elemental
carbons like Carbon Monoxide are produced by
the incomplete burning of fuel.

125ʼ x 55ʼ

1 DAY

1 WEEK

26 ft 3 of CO2 + 143 ft 3 of NO2 = 4,383 Balloons

182 ft 3 of CO2 + 1001 ft 3 of NO 2 = 30,680 Balloons

1 MONTH

728 ft 3 of CO2 + 4004 ft 3 of NO 2 = 122,720 Balloons

290ʼ x 125ʼ

1 YEAR
8736 ft 3 of CO2 + 48048 ft 3 of NO2 = 1,472,640 Balloons

In one day, the CO2 output of the Holland Tunnel Canal Street exit would fill 674
birthday balloons and the NO2 would fill 3,708. Together, they fill 4,383 balloon
of pollution!
A Week : + 30,680 Balloons!
A Month: + 122,720 Balloons!!
A Year: + 1,472,640 Ballons!!!
That is over 250,000 ballons more than needed to lift a 4 year old into the
troposphere where green house gases collect.

Sam Rosen

17

SYSTEM LOGIC
STANDARD

SEASONAL WIND PATTERNS

ADAPTED

Wind is the driving force in the proliferation
of pollutants from the Holland Tunnel exit
into neighboring communities. By focusing
on predictable winds patterns, we leverage
their embodied energy to power their own
cleaning.
Intake for the filtration systems are positioned
strategically at the intersection of high wind
and pollutant densities.

6
5
4

9

7

PHYTOTRANSFORMATION

O

O

ABSORBTION

NO2
O

C

O

O

After initial mechanical filtration, the pollutants
are pulled through cross-flow membranes by
the difference in air pressure and into plant
beds where the phytoremediation occurs.

PHYTOEXTRACTION

During the phytoremediation process, NO2 &
CO2 are pulled up through the soil bed &
absorbed by plant roots.

CO2
N

N

- Sequestration & Phytovolatization

O

O

C

The NO2 & CO2 are then sequestered in
new growth biomass, like the roots, leaves,
stem, branches, & trunk of the plant. Oxygen
is exhausted as a biproduct.

O

2
3
11

1

8
10

12

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19

BUILDING GEOMETRY & WIND

SUMMER WINDS
Polluted Air
Haptic Space

WINTER

Cleaned Air

SPRING

SPRING, FALL, & WINTER WINDS
Polluted Air

FALL
Cleaned Air

SUMMER

Throughout the summer months, warm winds gust from the south, moving north up 6th Avenue. These winds
are funneled and instensified through Iron Lung’s haptic space, which acts as a direct reminder to visitors of the
building’s mechanics and purpose.
During the colder seasons, wind blows from the east. The haptic space is hidden from the winds, which would
be too uncomfortable for visitors.

An Exterior Portion: Portion of
the Building: The Geometry
Intensifies Summer Wind
Velocity, Acting as a
Reminder of the Intent of Iron
Lung.

MOUNDS

Are Positioned to Help Direct
Wind to Air Induction on
Building.

Public spaces are marked by intial plantings of native & robust plants such as Amercan Beech trees, while
Interrupted Ferns, Bloodroots & other native rhyzomes are allowed to colonize without restraint.
The extraction of CO2 from the air feeds the plants acting as a catalyst for the emergence of a modified
natural landscape and habitat for the wild turkey, fox, and even deer.

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21

EXHIBITION HALL

Looking Towards Haptic Space

EXHIBITION

LIBRARY
AUDITORIUM
AIR MONITORING STATION 1

AIR PROCESSING STATION
CLASSROOMs
LABORATORY
AIR FILTERING STATION
WATER COLLECTION
PERSONEL FACILITY
RESEARCH CENTER
OFFICEs
DEHUMIDIFIER / EVAPORATOR
HUMIDIFIER

Metroform
neither
denigrates
nor
idealizes the future, but sees it as a
mesotopia â&#x20AC;&#x201C; a possible evolution of the
organization of cities and their social
structures. Metroform proposes that each
architecture is the ground for the next. In
this interface of building (private) and
building (private), a public realm
emerges, creating a continuum between
the
stratified private spaces of the
individual buildings and the resultant,
nonhierarchical public space.
Within this system, the architecture is no
longer the singular skyscraper, but a
plurality that reinterprets and reconstitutes
the urban condition.

The skyscraper is the vertical manifestation of the typical urban condition.
Metroform simutaneously investigates the reorganization of this condition parametrically and sectionally. It
speculates on the emergent relationships within this re-envisioned, nonhierarchical, continuum of private and
public space.

PUBLIC

P.O.P.S

PRIVATE
Hierarchy of
Space

Metroform

Hierarchy of Space

Skyscraper

City

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27

SECTION

Reorganization of Space Around Public Realm

Sam Rosen

29

P.O.P.S.

ARCHITECTURAL MANIFESTATION
At instances of convergence, the regularity of private
spaces gives way to the inherent unpredictability of
public spaces. The discrete moments within these areas
are defined by gradients of deformation losing their
particular signification as architectural elements.

P.O.P.S.
These transitional spaces play a localized role in
negotiating between the public and the private realms
within a singular architecture. Within the proposed
plurality, these spaces mediate and facilitate larger
urban relationships such as public thoroughfares,
institutions, and cultural or private economies.

Anchored by the Nashville Sounds
Ballpark, the Basins at Sulphur Dell
leverages the neighborhoodâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s central
location and unique history to create a
resilient community & enable healthy
lifestyles. The diagonal axes cut through
the fabric extending the Music City Green
Way, creating community connections &
access to the riverfront. The greenway
system protects the neighborhood through
strategically
placed
water-collecting
plazas that occupy the lowest points of
the site & create spurs of activity off the
greenway.

The subject of this project was a
Cooperative. Because a co-opâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s most
important asset is trust, the negotiation of
personal space among members is a
prime concern.
The space must be inclusive, encouraging
the mingling of people & ideas, but also
allowing individuals to work alone in
privacy.
To accomplish this two-part goal, the
building has open floor plans in which
undulating floors & ceilings create an
internal landscape of valleys, peaks, &
plateaux that delineate the space visually
& auditorily without partitioning it.

PERSONAL SPACE
Individuals use different methods to maintain
their privacy.
One aggressive method is for the individual to
claim a prominent space so that others must
avoid them. A common and passive way is
for the individual to move to the periphery of
a space to avoid being noticed or interacted
with.

The proposal of a new Patco stop, connecting
New Jersey to Philadelphia’s historic Old
City, acknowledges the area’s lack of public
transportation, building on its existing job base
and notoriety as a tourist destination.
The site planning seeks to respect different
groups’ needs and individual privacy while
promoting cross pollination between them.
To execute this I deployed the techniques
investigated in the defense of personal space
over a speculative mapping of the movement
of different groups of people throughout the
site and hypothosized a solution to temper
the influx of people and activity due to the
creation of this transportation hub, as well as
the Transitional Housing.

Sectionally undulating floors and irregular
hollow columns delinate space.
The floor cradles different programs, the size &
adjacencies are directly related to programsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;
level of intamacy. This cradling is actualized by
the breaking of lines of site from one zone to the
next and by precisely attenuating or, inversely,
letting sound infiltrate from neighboring zones.

AUDABILITY - Infiltration/

AMBULATION - Flows of Movement

Attenuation of Sound

Hollow columns provide vertical circulation
between floors as well as an opportunity for
sound, fresh air and light to penetrate deep
into the building.
LINE OF SIGHT

Index, located in Tribeca, NY, a hybrid
hotel & residence, incorporates library
facilities throughout its circulation &
ancillary spaces.
Rather than placating the social and
economic elite, it seeks to create an
inclusive monastic retreat incorporating a
public library: the last bastion of civic
institutions directly serving the public.

BUILDING FACADE
Panels on the buildings façade open to varying
degrees in order to alter the amount of light
throughout the building creating different levels
of intimacy.
Panels are widest open when serving public
space. They also change orientation to allow
the maximum level of natural light in the building.

This work is an exploration in thick, rigid,
origami. The project investigates modes
of constructing deployable, rigid plate
structures while keeping a single degree
of freedom within the system.
The wall is fully collapsible and actuated
at a singular central point to control the
entire folding process. The plates are
each constructed of two 3/16 birch
panels sandwiching a singular textile
membrane that acts as a centralized
hinge. Differentiation between beveled
and butt-ended panel edges determines
the the systemâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s ridge / valley
organization and controls the wallâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s
ability to collapse entirely.

The Proof is in the Prototype.
Investigating different patterns and their spatial capacities meant imposing constraint through the
exploration of material logics.
On a small scale our team looked at different patterns, controlling them through a series of offset
panels that dictated which edges would buckle to form valley folds and which would rise to become
mountain folds. At a larger scale, in our Connection Mock-up, we explored how to control the
direction and depth of folds through the use of butt joints and varying degrees of mitered joints.

Appended Space explores the scaling
and fabricating of an architectural scale
proposal, utilizing the principles explored
in our earlier work â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Folding Plates.â&#x20AC;&#x2122;
The work investigates five main goals:
Scalability of the system, asymmetric and
irregular folding patterns, material
construction and fabrication, potential to
create, append, and manipulate space
through folding, all while maintaining a
single degree of freedom.

In the pursuit of assymetric and irregular folding
patterns I found the Kawasaki theorem, which
dictates that a pattern may be flat-folded locally.
Further clash detection was necessary to
determine whether it was flat-foldable globaly.
Using both the Miura-Ori fold pattern and the
Kawasaki theorem, we could iterate quickly
through patterns: first drafting them in 2D, then
testing for flat-packing with grasshopper.

A

B
B’ A’

C
D’

D
C’

KAWASAKI THEOREM

A + A’ = B + B’ = C + C’ = D + D’ = 180˚

FINAL PATTERN

Sam Rosen

61

MITERED
TOP-PANEL

MEMBRANE
HINGE

BUTT-JOINT
BOTTOM-PANEL

MATERIAL SANDWICH

FULL SCALE MOCK-UP
Each panel is constructed of two sides of 1” extruded
polystyrene foam, hot-wire cut to create butt and
miter edges.
The panels are resin coated and sandwiched on
either side of a fiberglass mesh membrane acts as
a hinge. On each 8’x8’ wall, a single 100lb linear
actuator controls the folding and unfolding of the
system.

The concept of the Portal seeks to intensify
and elongate the interaction centered
around a door, specifically the front
entrance of a house.
The Portal investigates memory through
the opening of a door, using that lens to
explore ideas of knowledge and security
as well as the discrete but connected
actions of approaching, acknowledging,
opening, and accepting.
As the occupant approaches the door, the
frit patterns on the glass slowly align
themselves, extending the questioning
moment: "Who is it?"

We are thrown into the world from our first home. The threshold to this place of elemental intimacy,
familial ties and safety is the front door. It is a portal.
When a child runs to meet her parents on their return, she welcomes them back from a world of
unimaginable distances and danger. When grown, the child is on the other side of the relationship,
but the influence of her first home, first door, first relationships remains. Every door she opens, will be
perceived through the lens of her first.

CONCEPTURAL NARRATIVE

MECHANICS

frame
track for rollers
rubber band to provide tension
from string and motor
track for rollers
glass

motor
motor head attached to string
rollers
power wire to motor

CLOSED

OPEN

The panels start in the offset position making a closed and private aperture. Embedded with sensors
and a motor, the door senses when a visitor approaches, and the panels slowly start to align. The person
in the house is alerted and moves to the door. As the panels align, the visitor becomes increasingly
identifiable: first a silhouette, then some color, then body features. Finally, as the visitor comes face to
face with the door, the frits perfectly align revealing their identity. The privacy of a solid door, and the
intimacy of a glass door combined in one.

Innovation Award: Exemplary use in a Small Firm
AIA Technology in Architectural Practice 2015

The D-Bridge (Bridge) is a single-story,
single-room, 1200SF building enclosing a
path between an existing residence and
an Art Gallery.
The building is a
thickened shell with canted glazing and
six door openingsâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;it is environmentally
controlled, and it provides both a
programmatic link between living and
gallery spaces and a series of smaller,
more intimate porch-like spaces around
the boundaries of the buildings.
The doubly curved flexure shell is
structurally rationalized into 1000+ sheet
metal voxels that act as the design DNA
for all other elements.

OVERVIEW
The D-Bridge is a yet-unbuilt architectural project and experimental structure that serves as an extension to a
private gallery and residence in the Philadelphia area. Our office worked in close collaboration with facade
and BIM experts, as well as several other fabricators and consultants in the greater Philadelphia region.
We intend to present the Bridge as a case study in small-office technological design and information management.
The desire to design and construct a project like the D-Bridge grew from the BIM-like philosophy that serves as
Point B Designâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s founding ethos. We gained the knowledge needed to design the project through collaboration
with contemporary BIM experts, as well as adopting tools and expertise from the burgeoning open-source
community around Rhino and Grasshopper.
We were thus able to transform our primary tool for geometric control to our organizational system for the
entire project. We used it throughout. Everything, from formal experiments to visualization of data, coordination
and design of building systems, fabrication management, delivery logistics, and construction scheduling, was
managed with the software we used for 3D modeling and drawing.

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73

DESIGN SURFACE

SIMPLE MESH

CUSTOM DYNAMIC REMESHING

-

Triangle-ized approximation of design
surface, serves as a starting point for our
operations & additions to the mesh.

The geometry of the shell is captured in each individual voxel, so
that the overall shape emerges as the bridge is assembled. This
is the moment of “embodied intelligence,” where each voxel is
derived as an intelligent part. Because each voxel has a place in
the shell and its relationship with its neighbors can be indexed and
mapped, the order of construction operations need not be held to
a linear time-line.

In all, the job is going to require about ~300 sheets of 60”x120”
sheet metal. About 200 of these are 16GA and 100 are 12GA.

994 Voxels

1113 Voxels

The linear amount of laser cutting is about 400,000 inches. This
includes dashed cuts along the edges to assist bending and all rivet
holds.

1163 Voxels

1122 Voxels

Since the Design Surface is a relatively fixed surface area – the density of the polygons is also established via an interpretation of
ranges of sizes, overall polygon count, and number of sides to each polygon.
Sam Rosen

Periphery faces of each tile would be folded so all faces
in a specific nodal point - while having different fold
angels - would result in the same z-depth.

2

1
a

a

A

a

6

a
5

a

3

a
4

NODAL POINTS
A nodal point is defined by its underlying structural voxelâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s center point. All tile faces (a) that share a
nodal point (A), irrespectrive of which tile they belong to, are folded along their interior edges, so
that their outtermost points have the same z-depth.
This means that all fold angles are unique.
Depth at nodal points is detemined by the slope of the corresponding structural voxel. The greater
the slope -which maxes out where the legs come down to meet their piers- the greater the z-depth
at a nodal point. As the shell plateaus at its apex, the concave nature of the nodal points becomes
less and less.
Sam Rosen

VISUAL VOXELS
The primary role of the innermost layer is to create a specific phenomenological experience for users of
the bridge. While the structural voxelsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; depth was determined by the flexure resitance required, the visual
voxels can undulate freely, carving the volume into understandable spaces and providing a substrate for
lighting fixtures and air diffusers.

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85

The development of the visual voxels alternated between advancing a digital framework and material
studies. The digital framework established relationships between discrete points on individual visual voxels
that could be manipulated to create global gradients of change; the material studies clarified where value
was embedded in the transformations.